Conceptions of function in modern architecture

Although the definition of function continues to be used today, it hides, behind an apparent homogeneity, a host of interpretations that, in the process of 20th-century modernity, have reached radical divergences. Since the 1920s, when function began to be redefined by different authors, diverse and contradictory approaches to it have been proposed, both theoretically and design-wise. The reinterpretation of these divergences, understood as varied and contradictory conceptions of the same problem, and their relationship with the contributions to function in the Vitruvian tradition is the general objective of this work. In the most radical inquiries of modern architecture, function takes on interests that go beyond its merely utilitarian objectives, reaching proposals for habitats that implicitly and/or explicitly imply the extension of an architectural project to a project for society, incorporating other signifiers into the very definition of function: efficiency, adaptation, flexibility, range, or interaction. These concepts are not understood from a chronological or historicist perspective, but rather present points of convergence and disagreement, appearances and reappearances that weave a genealogy expressed primarily in writings.